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In the past few weeks I’ve been working on several ideas for some really compelling content on my blog. In fact, as I write this post I currently have 36 drafts in my wordpress admin area. Some of these drafts are just one line topics but others are half completed work in progress posts that I’ve been updating slowly from time to time. All of the posts ideas I come up with are done using my simple steps to avoid writers block that I’ve written about before.

The posts that I’ve been slowly working on for the past few weeks are the ones that excite me the most. These are the posts that I truly believe have the potential to be linked to by top bloggers, receive a spike of traffic from Stumble Upon, Digg etc. and could even be used as a future resource for bloggers to come back to. I’ll be posting a few of these in June and am really interested to see how they do to not only increase traffic but to also improve my RSS subscription numbers.

Other posts that I’ve been spending a lot of time on are case studies. What I won’t do is write about a new website I’m going to launch on my blog (post the URL) and then analyze the web statistics after a certain period of time. Do you see where the problem is? If you’re analzying data after posting the URL on your blog the numbers won’t be as accurate as they show be. I hate when people do this. Especially if the website that is being written about is a test to see how much money can be made from it “without work.” Either way I really enjoy reading detailed case studies because I’ve been able to learn a lot from them which is exactly why I want to document and share more of my real life examples as well.

How do you plan out future posts or do you just pick out a topic to write about it that day?

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What criteria do you look at when deciding what type of forum you should start? I’m sure you’ve heard many other people recommend that you should start a forum based on a topic that interests you. The logic if obvious, if you don’t really care about the forum topic(s) than how can you set about creating a successful forum? I agree with this reasoning and even wrote about this a while ago. However, what can you do when the topic that interests you is not a profitable niche?

How I Chose My Niche

As some of you may already know by reading my story about getting started earning money on the internet, I run several video game related forums. I’ve always had a passion for video games and have even played Halo on the professional level. I also sell Halo lessons through my blog (in need of a serious redesign) over at thehalogod.com. In fact, I was even fortunate enough to use the success of my Halo videos to help launch a couple game related forums. However, as I look at the forums I’ve created I can’t help but think about the profitability of the niche I’ve chosen to target on the web.

The Low Profit Niche

I’ve focused most of my web properties around video games and in one circumstance - a single video game franchise i.e. Halo Boards. The question I now ask myself - that I should have done long ago - is how can I really make good money from these video game focused forums? Now I’m not just in it for the money and in fact if my revenue ever grew a substantial amount I would sponsor bigger events, provide giveaways, make improvements to the forum, and the list goes on. However, how can you really expect to make money off of advertising when nearly all of the active members and even the guests that find the site through search engines or other websites already own the video game system and games that most of the conversations center around (as in the case of Halo Boards)? The answer is simple - it’s extremely difficult. Even if the members of the website do click ads you have to remember these ads are still focused on video games which are frequently low paying.

Now the reason why these keywords don’t pay out well is because quite simply the ads that are displayed are for inexpensive items. When you see ads to buy third party game controllers, new video games and xbox live subscription cards you know that because these items hover around $50 there is not a lot of money to be earned with each sale. The advertiser can only make money if the cost of advertising is low enough that the conversions outweigh the cost of the ads. So to even make a decent sum of money you’ll need a lot of clicks.

The High Profit Niche

Now lets look at another example. Let’s say you run a forum focused on HDTV’s and the discussion of new HDTV’s, reviews and anything else related to this “new” technology. Immediately you know that a significant portion of the members on the forum are there to buy a new HDTV and are using your forum as a resource to help make an informed decision. And because of the nature of the forum members that are gathering more info to make a purchase, if they do click an advertisement they’re more likely to buy. This will help prevent your Adsense account from being smart priced but that’s a conversation for another day.

The cost of an HDTV can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. As you can see the products that will display in the advertisements on the HDTV forum example are much more expensive than those being displayed in the low paying niche. Naturally, because the products are so much more expensive advertisers have to pay much more for their ads ad clicks. With one low paying niche forum you could make a couple hundred dollars a month and on the other high paying niche forum you could make a couple thousand dollars a month with the same traffic level and activity. So before you launch your next forum make sure that you are not only interested in the topic but you also ask yourself, “How much money is there in this this niche?”

Lessons Learned

I’m not going to look back and view the decisions I made as a mistake, because starting those forums is what got me into earning money on the web in the first place. I also had a lot of fun doing it, but now that I’ve learned some lessons I’m certainly going to do more extensive research to determine how profitable the niche is.

Have you ever made this “mistake” before? What factors help you determine which new websites and forums to run with?

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For those of you working any significant amount of time on the web I urge you to purchase a second monitor. I’ve been doing most of the work for my blog on my laptop while I ride the train, but I have several other projects I’ve wanted to start that will take much more than the time I have on my daily commute. With that in mind, I finally purchased a second monitor that is basically the same as my old monitor (i.e. same screen size and max resolution) but a newer model number.

I never really bothered purchasing the second monitor before this because I wasn’t really focused on starting any new projects but I have several ideas lined up that I couldn’t put off any longer. So although I should have purchased the second monitor long ago I’m looking forward to the increased efficiency that it will bring to the table. In fact, part of what kept me lazy was the fact that at my 9-5 job I have two monitors and it’s frustrating to come home with only one to work on. Again, yes it’s that stupid that I never purchased this long ago but either way check out the new set up:

Before:

After:

By the way, they’re two 19 inch monitors. The next time I’ll upgrade is when I get a bigger desk. Then I’ll go with two 24 inch monitors.

Are you dual wielding?

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After running the contest to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I realized that I made a few mistakes in the execution of the blog contest that I have since had some time to reflect on. So as a result of that contest I’ve come up with a list of 5 lessons that I learned from running my blog contest that I believe will help improve the effectiveness of your blog’s contests as well.

1. Define your contest goal(s)

Before starting a blog contest you should clearly define the goal of the contest. What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you want people to post about your contest and receive some link backs?
Do you want to increase your RSS subscriber count?
Do you want to encourage more participation?

It’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog contest otherwise it won’t be as effective. I never really set out to define the goals of my blog’s contest and so I ended up with a contest that I ran but without any strong numbers to shoot for. If you set specific and measurable goals for your blog contests you’ll see improved your results because you’re more invested in the outcome.

2. Simplify the contest

First and foremost make it easy for your readers to participate in your blog’s contest. Don’t create a laundry list of hoops your readers have to jump through, but at the same time you don’t want to innundate them with too many ways to enter. If your contest is relatively small like mine was, try providing only one way for readers to enter your blog’s contest. If your primary goal is to increase your RSS subscriber count than use that criteria as the only way to win prizes in the contest. The size of the prize pool should also help you to determine what you should require your readers to accomplish. Because if you’re not offering a lot of prizes than it will be hard to get people to put forth the effort and write about your contest.

On the flip side you don’t want to make it too easy to enter the contest. The perfect example here is just requiring readers to write a single comment on a post to enter the contest. While this makes it incredibly easy for readers to participate I wouldn’t recommend using this entrance method exclusively even if your blog is really small.

3. Offer more prizes

With the contest I ran I offered five 125×125 blog ads on the sidebar along with a 468 x 60 ad. These prizes came out to a total cash value of $140. This is a fairly small sum of money and it doesn’t really bring about a strong call to action to participate in the contest. Looking back at how many people entered the contest I can see how this contest served more of my current readers as opposed to bringing in a ton of new subscribers and link backs. Perhaps a few people subscribed to my RSS feed that were sitting on the fence, but again if I offered more prizes I could have seen much stronger results.

4. Set a deadline that provides plenty of time for readers to enter

I ran my blog’s birthday contest for only two and a half weeks, which doesn’t allow for a long time to enter a contest. Granted, I already knew that the prizes I was offering weren’t really that huge but I should have ran the contest for at least one month to grant plenty of time for people to read about and enter the contest.

If you’re running a really large contest than you may want also want to consider running it for a couple months to not only provide ample time people to participate but to also provide a lot of “face time” for the sponsors of your contest. The lengthy deadline will also give you more time to heavily promote the blog contest as well which leads me into my next point.

5. Promote your blog contest

Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog contest. One way you can promote your blog’s contest is through advertising on your own blog. I did this for my past contest by creating a couple simple banners. By promoting the contest through your own blog it will help to inform any new readers that may have missed the initial contest announcement post. Another way to promote the contest is by mentioning it in the bottom of each post during the run of the contest i.e:

I’m running a contest to celebrate my blog’s birthday. Subscribe to my RSS feed for your chance to win free advertising on ChrisGuthrie.net

Another option that should work well is if you’re offering such a large prize pool that people are much more inclined to write about your contest for a better shot at the prizes. This will help to further promote your contest but will only work well if the prize pool is significant.

Wrapping it up

Overall, I know that the next blog contest I run will take into account some of the lessons I’ve learned above and I’m sure I’ll learn even more the next time around. I don’t plan to run any more “small” blog contests in the future though as I want to go for something much bigger next time.

What do you think of the lessons I’ve learned? Have they helped you think about how you’ll run your next blog contest?

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Are you struggling to come up with a domain name for your blog or next project? Why not choose a name that sounds like or rhymes with an existing well established website. I thought of this the other day when I was waiting to catch my bus to take me into Seattle for work when I saw this truck drive by with big bold letters plastered on the side - Jobdango.com. Now what site immediately comes to mind when you hear ‘dango’? For me it’s the wildly popular Fandango.com. I checked out Jobdango.com and while it’s a Northwest job search engine and not something related to the movie business it’s easy to see what they’ve done by incorporating ‘dango’ into their domain name.

I’m certain that most people that see the advertisements for Jobdango.com or have heard of the website already have likely heard of Fandango.com. They may even go so far as to believe it’s a partner company. What Jobdango.com has done is used the association from another well known brand and applied it towards their Northwest job search engine Jobdango.com

This advertisement on the side of the truck got me thinking about other websites I’ve seen that have used similiar domain names in an effor to build off of some other websites’ branding success. Some other prime examples I’ve seen are dogster.com and catster.com both of which are named after friendster.com. The only difference is that they’re used for pets. However, it’s safe to say that the creators of dogster.com and catster.com knew what they were doing when they choose domain names with ’ster’ at the end to cash in on the success of friendster.com. Now some of you might be worried that it’s possible you could run into legal trouble for purchasing domain names with this practice in mind; however, as you can see from the above examples they’re different enough that there have been no lawsuits filed yet close enough to cash in off the previously established successful brand.

What are some other examples you’ve seen? Do you believe this is a good way to get a kick start to the branding of your website?

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‘How often should I blog?’ is a question we’ve all thought about and I believe is one of the most important questions to address. In the past year of reading numerous other blogs, I’ve come accross this discussion and it’s various forms so many times that I’ve lost count. But what I believe all these posts on the topic have done is to create the false sense that what they advise you do is the best and only way to approach blogging.

Find what works for you

I believe that it’s more important to determine what’s the best level of posting frequency for you than to listen to some person tell you how much you have to blog. Let’s take physical trainers as an example: Do you honestly believe they approach each and every client the same way and offer the same advice and excercises every time? Of course not! They develop a strategy specifically for that client based on various factors such as current physical condition (how long have you been blogging) and the amount of time you have dedicated to work out (time in the day to blog). But one thing is for sure, physical trainers give you a schedule to stick to that is designed to give you maximum results. This idea can be applied to the categories of posting frequency in the same way:

Daily Posting

Readers visit your blog on a daily basis because they know what to expect - one post everyday. I have several blogs in my RSS reader that post daily and I enjoy the fact that every morning I check my RSS reader and I get to see what they have to say. This consistent blogging schedule works great for those that can keep it up, but this is a huge time commitment for the blogger. Don’t try and commit to a daily blogging schedule if you know you don’t have the time for it because eventually this will show in your writing. If you do decide to post daily then I would highly recommend that you use the wordpress time stamp feature to ensure you have a post ready in advance.

Three to Four Posts a Week

This is the category I fit into along with most of the other blogs in my RSS reader. I do my best to blog every other day; however, I mainly just try to make sure I post about 3 to 4 times a week. Occasionally I’ll write a couple posts back to back and follow up with another post two days later, but the main focus is to make sure that the gaps aren’t too far between each post. What I do like the most about blogging in this category is that fact that I never feel a constant pressure to blog, which is really good for me considering I work a full time job and have a long commute as well. If I did have this constant pressure to churn out a post every day than I believe the quality of my content could possibly suffer. Likewise, readers don’t really have a set expectation as to when they’ll see a post if you have already established that you blog about 3 to 4 times per week because they’ve seen your posting frequency on your blog before and if they’re still reading your posts they’re fine with it.

Once a Week Blogging

The only way I believe this category of posting can work is if you write very lengthy and incredibly useful posts on a consistent scheduled basis. If you post once a week every Friday (or some other day of the week) I believe it could work for you. But if you are inconsistent on the day you post you could severely limit your success. I believe there is significantly less “wiggle room” when it comes to your posting frequency if you are already only posting once a week.

Anything beyond these levels of posting frequency and I think it’s time for you to start writing more frequently, but if you feel inclined to post a couple times a month on an inconsistent basis and still manage to obtain readers I’d love to hear from you.

Wrapping it up

I want to reiterate that in the quest to maximize blogging effectiveness it is important to establish some form of a blogging schedule. You have to decide on whether this schedule will be on a daily basis or less. Now I don’t believe your blogging schedule has to be completely rigid, but readers come to expect a flow of content based on your past posting behavior and if you don’t meet those expectations you may lose some readers. Although I believe the loss of readers due to an inconsistent posting schedule has been over exagerated by many bloggers it is still an important factor to consider when deciding how often you will blog. In the end, I believe that if someone truly loves your blog’s content they won’t unsubscribe simply because you don’t post for a few days. If they’re that fickle, then they are probably just as likely to unsubscribe to your blog just for reading a post they don’t like.

So now that you’ve read my ideas, how about sharing some of yours? How often do you blog?

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I spent about 30 - 45 minutes a couple nights ago stumbling accross the Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Weblogs and Video Games categories. I’ve never really used the website that much due to time constraints, but I actually ended up having a lot of fun. However, one thing I noticed is that after a while I realized something, when I stumble upon websites I was frequently deciding on whether or not to scroll down simply based on the look of the website. Is this a superficial way to view websites? Yes. Is this what forces some stumble upon visitors away from your website? Yes.

When I see a design that looks like it’s coming out of the late 90’s or just barely entering the new millenium I think to myself, “I don’t have a lot of time to invest finding new websites so I’m not going to bother looking at this one.” lol… Now granted, sometimes I’ll stick around to let the title try and convince me it’s worth reading but having a poor and/or outdated design makes me want to click the stumble button again to check out something else and I’m sure other people think the same leads to a higher bounce rate for stumblers in my opinion.

I know this is a short post, but I’d like to hear some feedback about how you use StumbleUpon:

As a webmaster or blogger, do you believe your poor website design leads to a higher bounce rate for Stumblers?

As a reader do you judge a book by it’s cover?

Let me know what you think and feel free to check out my stumble upon profile and add me to your friends list.

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